Thursday, March 31, 2011

Not much to report this week from UM HQ - well apart from the usual stuff of course! Busy trying to get to grips with the S4 still, and just got an email from NI on a software update that'll improve the graphics on the sound waves - which is a good thing in my opinion! Still busy working on something new and exciting for you deep house music followers - hope to be able to share that with you in a couple of weeks!

Right, down to business, here's the tunes that have been receiving some serious noise on the office speakers this week!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

So much going on here at UM HQ right now it's pretty exciting times! Can't yet share the biggest news with all of you, but it's going to be great! Stay tuned! Meanwhile WMC is over, but the new music keeps flowing, last week was one of those weeks where everything sounds so good, and so far I'm 26 promo's into a whole new batch of greatness!

Some of you will have spotted the new radio drops within the shows! A massive thanks to Jaidene Veda and David Alvarado for sorting them out for me last week - expect more to come in the future from some of our favourite deep house and tech house friends!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Whooooa! Another one of those busy weeks with loads going on - seems there's a tonne of new music heading out there (all of it very good too which you can't always say) and plans are afoot to launch my very own imprint with a hand picked crew of artists that represent the untitledmusic sounds!

All of which was topped off last night by the arrival of my brand new radio drops from the sultry sounding songstress Jaidene Veda - all part of the master plan to add a little more branding to the shows! Okay, so we had a little outage with Soundcloud this week which has caused all sorts of issues for me and plenty of others looking to promote their new tunes, but here's the select few that have been cranking out here at HQ this week...

Friday, March 11, 2011

I'm naturally very nosey. Fact! So, I thought you might be too and maybe, if you're like me you'd be interested in what some of our favourite music industry people get up to when they're not updating Facebook or doing Charts for Beatport and the rest. What would it be like to see what they got up to in an average week?

London-based Pete Dafeet is a producer and co-owner of deep house label Lost My Dog Records for the last 6 years and DJ'ing for 12 years and producing for 8. He's sold more records than I've ever managed to listen to, releasing and remixing for Shaboom, Robsoul, Detour, Toolroom, Lost My Dog, Uniform, Artizan, Headtunes, Southside Shuffle and more – music that’s been supported by household names like Mark Farina, Danny Tenaglia, Groove Armada, and Laurent Garnier. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. As well as co-owning and running one of the finest and most consistent labels around he also holds down a proper job (as my Dad would say) working as a social marketing consultant at Metia, a digital agency based in London.

It makes him a very busy man!...

Monday
Struggle into work to start preparing for a big pitch we've got coming on Wednesday. I got into social marketing through our experiences with Lost My Dog – my passion is definitely music marketing, but I enjoy transferring the same logic to bigger companies in different industries.

Pick up new booking for the summer, for a new night starting at Vibe bar on Brick Lane – a fun venue to play so looking forward to that. Last played there 3 years ago for Bosh Records, and impressed with this new night's schedule: they've got Tom Middleton, Shonky, Aki Bergen, Ed Davenport penciled in for the first few months.

Spend evening working on new Lost My Dog record, get fed up and throw most of it away. Like the core drums so keep them to start a new track when I've got a bit more patience...

Tuesday
Stuck in a meeting room at work all day, ideas coming together slowly for the pitch – the company does a lot right in isolation, so its mainly just a case of starting to connect some of the dots (got to love the marketing speak eh?!).

Spend the evening working on a brief for our designer Tom to create a booklet reviewing the last 12 months of Lost My Dog - we did a lot last year, so want to get it all down on paper! Will be sending out to industry people to help push the label and hook some new gigs.

WednesdayPitch day at the day job – not a big fan of the prep, so am happy once we're in the room and can just talk. Fish and chips for lunch, then chat with Ian (one of my partners in Lost My Dog) briefly to arrange a label meeting in London for later this month. He lives up near Newcastle so we don't get too many chances to do things face to face.

Spend the evening buying new downloads on Juno and burning Cd's ready for weekend gigs. Honestly prefer buying music to getting promos, nice to support the labels and so much easier to find the music you want to play.

ThursdayQuiet morning catching up on the day-job, gym at lunch then an afternoon of meetings. One is a demo of a new online monitoring tool that looks quite fun – enjoy keeping up to date on the geeky stuff, tends to give some ideas for the label too. Home on time, in bed by 10 as up early tomorrow.

Friday
Up at 3:15 for flight to Lithuania from Stansted. Painful. Standard Ryanair experience – spilt coffee, abusive passenger, bag ends up 20 rows away from me. Arrive just before noon to lots of snow, picked up and driven for some local food and beer before heading to the hotel to relax. Manage to fit in 3 big meals and 2 naps before gig. Awesome. Play for 90 minutes at Pop Star Bar, it's a young crowd so play a few house classics they know. Nightcrawlers anyone? Head to promoter's new whisky bar for carry on, get to bed around 6.

SaturdayFeel a bit tender after last night, don't leave hotel room until 4pm thanks to promoter organising late check-out. We grab some food then drive to the capital Vilnius for second gig. Eat at a great restaurant in the old town, learn about some of the history, grab a few drinks, then head to Tarantino for the gig. It's an older crowd here, and they like it deeper – play a couple Shonky tracks to start which they love. Someone makes my weekend by requesting Susan Cries (out recently on Lost My Dog), play the Rhythm Plate mix which gets the best reaction of the night. Bed around 5.

Sunday
Up at 8 for journey home. Fly up to Riga first in an old Fokker 50, love planes so this excites me. Make my connection by skin of teeth, watch Four Lions on the plane home – so funny. Get home and start working on that aborted track, before collapsing on sofa to watch the footy and catch up on some sleep.

As I'm sure you're all dying to know, Pete supports the mighty Middlesbrough (as do I before you start!), so I can only assume he was catching up on some real footy based on our current form!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

As someone once said, "The only constant is change", and as more and more DJ booths and bedrooms switch from vinyl or CDJ to digital systems the battle between the leading brands is pushing the technology on and on.

Last year saw Native Instruments launch the S4 Kontol (of which I've loved using so much) and now the rest of the Traktor family receives an overhaul. The main thrust of the changes are really incorporating the new software features from the S4 version into the standard package; loop recording, new effects, the sample decks that's so key to the S4 and perhaps the most significant is the TruWave waveforms feature, offering a whole new dimension to your mix (and it looks nice and sexy in that blue!) - it's able to differentiate between kicks, hi-hats and snares and anticipate your mix.

With various zoom levels you'll even be able to set up tighter cue points than ever before. And as with the S4 you'll be able to choose between layouts (something I've not quite got used to on the S4 but it does allow you to eliminate stuff you don't use - depending on your style).

The new package comes with a monster loops kits too - 40 original loops and 10 full tracks drawn from Loopmasters’ new DJ Mixtools series, plus additional scratch sounds by DMC Champ DJ Craze. Drum, bass, percussion and synth loop in dubstep, minimal, house, techno and trance styles all for you to do your own thing with.

And the future doesn't stop there, the Audio sound cards have had an update as has the S4 software (from what I can tell on NI's site) so I'm off to check my updates....

Been a full on week here in HQ, with WMC kicking off there's a deluge of new music, not all of it good (but that's the time of year I guess) - but some real gems to be enjoyed and hopefully UM73's showcasing some of them on your speakers right now!

I'm giving Twitter a bit of a go this month, mainly to see how it works, but to give the followers on there something a little extra! If you fancy following me join me here. OK, enough of the chat, let's get down to what tunes are keeping me going this week...

Friday, March 4, 2011

Kicking off a brand new series of UM Guest Mixes with the ever impressive Marvin Zeyss, a new name in 2010 that's featured plenty on the UM shows and brought us some of the finest new music of the year gone by, and certainly one to watch out for in 2011 and beyond.

Nuremberg resident Marvin Zeyss is a budding house and techno producer who wears his heart on his sleeve. Although not a musician in the traditional sense, he's always had a passion for music and began producing back in 2007. His personal style, a combination of deep and techy moods draws influences from far and wide but Zeyss is keen to point out he's certainly not 'minimal techno'.

His debut release came on NYC’s Nightchild Recordings in 2010. A year that saw the name Marvin Zeyss crop up plenty of times on the UM shows and my blog posts making him an obvious choice for the first in the new guest mix series.

So far his elegant sounds and classy depth has graced labels such as DeepVein, Modifi Grooves, In Deep, Tanztone, Nightchild, Beachtown, Vida! with remixes appearing on the likes of Logo Tunisia, Crossworld, Soulshift and many more.

At a mere 19, Marvin's name is surely one to watch this year and for many more to come with me being delighted to kick off the Guest Mixes for 2011 with such a quality set.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

After a couple of weeks away and an email outage things are back into full swing here at UM HQ, which means there's an abundance of music to catch up on and share with you and of course UM72 out there right now! Plenty more to come this week with the first in a new series of guest mixes too!